10 Years of ADHD + Business: What Actually Works

Hey, what's up and welcome to this YouTube video. My name is Jim Ebelhard and I have over a decade of experience running multiple businesses as someone with ADHD. And in this video I will be sharing the top lessons that I have learned, some of them the hard way, and hopefully you can learn something from it as well. And to start off, I want to introduce myself with some credibility. And this is not to brag, it's basically just to show that I'm not trash talking, that I actually have something to say. So yeah, let's dive into it. Starting off with where I am now. So as I already mentioned in the introduction, I have over 10 years of experience running multiple businesses with ADHD, from dropshipping, e-com, crypto, I tried it all. And I actually started off making websites, which is something that I still do up until the point of today, but only like really high-end work, which I will be diving into in a sec. I've been an award-winning entrepreneur within the Netherlands. I actually won the position in the T500 3 years in a row. That is basically a list for top inspiring tech talent under the age of 30 in the Netherlands. I've also read over 50 books on self-help, business, productivity, invested more than 25k in courses about personal growth, business, health, ADHD, And a lot of that knowledge I will also be sharing in this video, so definitely you should stick to this and watch it till the end. Then over here, this is my office. So I am really grateful that I'm in the position that we can rent a spot like this, because my office is here on the other part, which you cannot see from the picture. Then here, the other side, is my best friend, and here at this window, that's the office of my brother. So the three of us are actually renting this, and we are able to do that because we all are running our own companies and booking quite some success. And for me personally, this year we are going to do over €750,000 in revenue, which are some great numbers, and we're actually doubling our— almost doubling our revenue every year. We're working with some of the top-tier brands within the Netherlands. So for the digital agency, we are making award-winning websites for real estate companies. And I'm also doing a lot of innovation work, especially for the drinking water company within our province, building AI strategies and also implementing AI products. So that's all quite interesting. But what I think is most interesting is that I'm doing all of this in a stress-free way. Because I don't define success just by the financial numbers. I believe that true being really successful is being happy and fulfilled in general, in all areas of life, and not just grinding for the business and making money. So that's why I also want to show this picture. This is me in January in Phuket where I was actually training for a HIROX event, which is an advanced elite sports event which I completed in March with a pretty good time. So I'm really proud of that. I love to travel a lot, I like to optimize my health and nutrition, and also I like to work on my mindset and mental clarity to make sure that I actually am the version that the business needs. And that is all what I want to zoom in. I especially want to zoom in on this part, on basically the health optimization and the mental well-being side, because this hasn't always been the case, to be honest. And we've got— I'm just going to zoom in this in a sec. But I want to start off with this quote, this idea, this concept, which states: your business is an energetic reflection of you. If your reality isn't where you want it to be, it's because you haven't yet become the person who is capable of holding that level of success. And this is quite deep, but I believe it is so, so true. And before we zoom in into this model, I want to go a little bit back in time because here you see this is our current self, but this hasn't— this success hasn't always been. And there definitely also were a lot of down points in my career, and specifically a period like 1, 1.5 years ago, there was a moment where I burned out. I had a tough time because I, after the diagnosis for ADHD 3 years ago, I started medication And I basically transitioned into a period where I was working solo a lot, I took a lot of medication, I did a lot of technical work by myself. Well, this isn't really who I am on the inside. I was overthinking a lot, just working, using a lot of medication, a lot of caffeine, just grinding for money, not recovering well, eating a lot of protein bars, not really healthy food because the medication was also impacting my my sleep and my, yeah, ability to eat well. So wasn't healthy, wasn't fulfilled, and even though the business was growing a bit, I didn't even was that successful because I wasn't happy with who I was on the inside, and I also just lived to grind for the business, and I don't believe this is sustainable for the longer term. So that's also what this video will be about. It's basically the concept that your business is a reflection of who you are as a person, and the framework that I want to use throughout this video is basically the current self versus the future self. Who you are right now and where— who you want to become and where you want to go in life. Because as I already mentioned, your business partly is a reflection of you. So if you transform into your future self, you will also be able to convert into the business that you want to grow into. And it's all about defining what your current self is, also defining What your desired future self is. And then working on the gap. And this is basically a feedback loop because as soon as you transforming in the future self, it's important to realize that you are upgrading, you are evolving, and keep on setting new goals. And basically defining that new future vision. And for this 3 methods, so it's the 3-step process, I will be sharing a lot of personal examples and the most important information that has helped me the most to get where I am today. And you can do whatever you want with it. Is, to be honest, quite high level what I will be teaching here, what I will be sharing. It's not the small details. If you want to dive deeper into some concepts, then you can of course Google or ask ChatGPT or find other YouTube videos, or of course you can ask me and maybe I can make another video about it. So yeah, let's dive into the current self gap and the future self. So starting off with the current self. So I've set up this model, which is basically— I didn't set this up, sorry, I got this from the internet. This model, I have set it up within our system because this is something that I believe is really important to understand, that you have to look at yourself in a holistic way. And that is why I love this model so much. It's called the 8 Dimensions of Wellbeing. And it basically explains how you can look at all these dimensions and see yourself in a holistic way. That's basically what it does. And by looking at all those dimensions, you can really try to optimize your life for every dimension. And I don't say that every dimension should be taken as serious as the others. There is of course also, there will be specific moments when you don't have time to invest a lot of time and energy into social activities, and that's completely fine. What this all is about is realizing that because your business is partly a reflection of who you are, if you try to optimize those well-being dimensions, then you can make sure that this will reflect into your business as well. So I can give some quick simple examples, but the model basically speaks for itself. If I decide to go all in and grind on the business like I showed in my example, I started skipping social activities, I didn't work out a lot, I started to sleep worse, eat bad. All the things are reflecting to me in that person and also me and my business, because I'm not the one who can make the right decisions. I am not the one who is healthy, who is happy, who feels rested. And that builds a lot of mental fog. And yeah, it's just not the version that the business needs to actually scale. So Optimizing your well-being is very important, and looking at this model is a nice way to make sure that you check all important areas of your life. And you can start off by checking for every dimension how well you're doing now. And you can do this by just giving each dimension a number, so a score, so for example 1 to 10. And you describe the current situation so that you get a good understanding of your current well-being. That is for the personal side, which we will dive in a bit deeper. But first, for the business. So this is called the ladder of, uh, the value ladder of wealth. And why I like this model so much is because it's a ladder, and the idea is that you can climb this ladder. It isn't always the case that you start at this first part and end here. You can decide for yourself what your vision is. Maybe you don't have the ambition to build a full marketplace or social network like Facebook, Uber, eBay, or any big platform. Maybe you're fine stopping somewhere in the middle by basically selling consulting package or whatever it is. For me personally, um, it is SaaS that I'm currently working on right now. And what helped me a lot is basically defining for every step what I did so far and if I'm still operating in it and where I want to go. So I have the ambition to launch the SaaS that I'm currently building and also maybe later convert it into a marketplace or social network. But having this written down where you at now will already give you some understanding of, yeah, where you're currently at. And then later on for your future self, you're going to decide what your ambition is and where do you want to grow to. So I also recommend for every step that you have done, just write down what you did, what you liked about it, what you didn't like about it, because that is all information that we can to start defining the future self. That's the business side. Then for the personal side, there are a lot of things that you can focus on, but I listed what I think are the most important things to define your current self. And that starts with the values, because the values are basically the values that will be defining what you stand for in life and where you want to be authentic in. So for example, this is a list by James Clear. I found this list online with personal values, and just to give you an example of what those values include, I recommend picking around 5 values, and those 5 values will be basically be your guiding principles. And then you can always check, is the current situation, or is the choice that I have to make, or this new option that I have, is it in line with my values? It's very important to make sure that you're heading into the right direction. So start with defining which 5 values will be my values. Then there's personality profiles. So I personally recommend you to do 16 Personalities because this is a really nice free test you can do online, and it's basically a Yeah, I think one of the best, maybe the best personality test you can do. It's also the most known. It's based on the theories of Carl Jung, and you can just do it for free. So that's really nice. And here we have an example. This is my profile. I won't be going into detail about what this is, but after doing the, the quick test, which just takes you like 15 minutes, you will get a report with a lot of information, and including what I think is the most important is your strengths and your weaknesses. And those strengths and weaknesses, you can use those to basically define your current self. So you can list them down and make sure to understand what you're naturally wired for. So you can also use that information to start defining your future self later on. So you can do this for free online. I will put a link in the description. Do the personality test, get insights about who you are, and that's the same for the strengths and weaknesses. And then there's passion and interest. And for this one, I've created a framework myself, which has helped me a lot with better understanding my passion, interest, and also the life story and self-narrative. And I called it the lifeline. And what a lifeline is, it's basically a timeline of your events throughout life with highlights and lowlights. And you can do this in whatever way you want. For example, I'm using Figma, which I really love. It's a good tool. And you can build a timeline, and what I did, I split it into 3 phases: inner child period, child period, puberty, and adult. And then for every phase, I listed a lot of the events that really are core memories for me. So examples of specific highlights. So for example, when I was young, I have some extremely good memories about gaming because— and then not just gaming in general, but make it like hyper personal. So what I did, for example, I write down gaming with friends. But don't just keep it this general, list down what emotions it gave you. And for example, how did you game? So for me, I was really a strategy gamer, I loved competitive gaming, I loved fantasy worlds. I've written that all down and I also added screenshots and pictures from the games to basically really go deep on the things that triggered me to get a better understanding of, yeah, the things that I like. And what I did later on is share this information with ChatGPT to basically get a deep analysis of everything that in my life that has been a highlight or a lowlight. Because it's also important to list the things that, yeah, were extremely dissatisfied you, or maybe some traumas or other things that impacted you and the current self. So yeah, you can just create a timeline like this, share the emotions, connect things together. You can do it in whatever way you want, just do it in a way that works for you. It doesn't really matter. It's not about how you do it. It's about thinking about the events, listing it down, and having something you can look at and maybe share with AI if that is something that interests you. This is of course not mandatory. You can do this Yeah, if you like it. Um, okay, and then the same for life story and self-narrative. So you can also use the lifeline for that. Won't be going into detail on this one as well. Then there's the inner world, and for that I will be using this nice example that I also had from someone else. Sam often teach me that with a scale example, and I really love this example, so I will be using this example in this video as well. And it's basically the scale of beliefs. And if we take an example, I will use a personal example for this one, which is I am lazy. And since I have ADHD, throughout my childhood a lot of people have called me lazy, including my parents, which was completely fair by them because I really sucked at keeping my room clean and stuff like that. And also in school I couldn't really keep up, so a lot of teachers thought there was something wrong with me. So this all builds upon the scale on I am lazy. So I'm lazy, and because everyone told me you're lazy, you're lazy, and you really start to believe that you are lazy. But the thing is, I didn't really, I weren't lazy. The problem was I had to do things that I didn't want to do, and my ADHD brain struggled with that. Then what I started doing later on when I understand how this works is I basically started telling myself, I am not lazy, and I'm putting this on the other side of the scale. So I'm basically reverse engineering it in my head and telling myself that I'm not lazy. And the fun fact is your brain doesn't even know if it's real, but by just remembering yourself and telling it to yourself, you will train your mind to basically believe that you're not lazy. And especially if you of course build confidence by showing yourself that you're not lazy, it even works better. So for me, booking success with the business built up on my confidence, and now the scale is more on the other side. Now I really believe I am not lazy. So that is basically how it works. So start getting a clear understanding of what your limiting beliefs are. It can be anything. It can be I'm lazy, or I'm not smart enough, I'm not good enough. Anything. Just go deep on that one, journal about it. And that's also next step, emotional patterns. Journaling has been one of the things that has helped me so much as well. So finding out about your emotional patterns, finding about, uh, yeah, what makes you happy, or, uh, yeah, what gets you stressed. Writing it down just helps a lot. And you can do this every day, or maybe weekly, or monthly, In the beginning when I started, I did it daily, and I think I recommend to do it daily as well. But there are periods where I skip it, and that's the same for like a routine and stuff like that. Sometimes I just don't feel it, and then I recommend to not do it. Because if you can't go deep and you don't have the feeling that it is adding any extra value, don't just do it to do it. Only do it when it feels like you really are gaining something from it. Then there's mental habits. And mental habits, for this it's really important that you try out CBT, which is cognitive behavioral therapy. And I think it's really nice method to basically also kind of rewrite the specific thought patterns into positive ones. So for example, you have overthinking, or maybe you have people pleasing, or whatever you have to struggle. Now that we have tools like ChatGPT available, it is so easy. So for if we take, for example, the one I listed down here. So over, we can just ask GPT, be my overthinking CBT coach. And then it's going to help me with being a CBT coach. So First, when you're overthinking, when you're usually stuck in a loop, when you have a thought, right? GPT breaks it down. Catch the thought, challenge the thought, change the thought. So that's basically a therapy process that you can use to, yeah, to rewire these mental habits. So now I can use this chat to basically insert my thoughts and get help by a therapist, aka in this case, AI GPT. So a nice method, CBT. And then there's self-talk. So most of the people have an inner voice, and that inner voice a lot of the time is also spitting out negative things. Like, you're not good enough, or why did you do this or that. And that can be really annoying and really tough and really hard. And I honestly believe that it also is helping you a lot. But sometimes it can be good to realize that that voice in your head is not who you are. It's just basically your ego telling things, but deeper down you're not that voice. And to only realize that can help you so much. And to basically start adjusting that voice, there definitely are some tactics that have helped me. One of them is affirmations. Affirmations is basically saying out loud things like to build on your confidence or to repeat the strengths that you have from your personality test to really start wiring them into your brain. And then there's mindset training where you basically— I will go get back on this because this is better if you already have defined the future self, but it's basically repeating specific things to help you rewire your thoughts. And then there's coping mechanisms. So to give a personal example on this one, I had the coping mechanism where every time I booked a lot of success, I fucked it up in the weekends by drinking a lot or eating very bad or going to parties and making late nights. And it was just always the case that after a good victory, I ruined it by basically destroying myself. And this was a pattern that related to something in my childhood, and I found this out by journaling, by doing meditation, and all that stuff. And yeah, this helped me a lot. And yeah, you can really work on that as well by doing journaling, by doing meditations, and the mindset training and affirmations. But it starts with discovering if you even have something like a coping mechanism. So for me it really was the self-sabotaging. So it basically was coming from my childhood, which I already explained. Whenever I, yeah, basically had a moment of victory, I didn't feel like I was worth it. That was basically it. And I discovered that by meditating. And now just realizing that it has already caused me to fix it. So yeah, could be interesting for you as well. So that's the whole part on the current self, and now we're going to dive into the future self. So not the gap, because this was the one we're going to do last. So first, let's dive into the future self. So now that we've defined our full identity, the full current self that we are, we can get clear on where do we want to go in life, who do we want to become, and what business do we become want to grow into. So I recommend by starting with the business side here, so we get a clear understanding of where do we want to go with the business, so we also can align our well-being dimensions based on that goal with the business. Because for example, for some, uh, parts of the ladder, you might want to have a bigger network, so you maybe want to socialize more, or other examples. So let's start off with my personal example. I, I already just men mentioned that, uh, I did a lot of this, um, um, yeah, parts of the letter I did, uh, things in. And right now for me, the biggest goal is working on my SaaS. And by the way, if you want to check out this SaaS, it's basically a platform where I will be, uh, helping you with growing from your current self to your future self. It's an AI platform where you can basically create a digital version of yourself. You can check out the link in the below to InnerSights. But yeah, let's continue with the video. And if you don't want to check it out, it's completely fine. I will share the knowledge here as well. But if you're really interested, check it out. So define for yourself where you want to go, and I highly recommend you to set really, really, really big goals. Dream as big as you can, because the dreamer— the bigger your dreams are, the more you will become in life. That's just, that's just a fact. I mean, there are so many theories explaining that the bigger your goals are, the more you accomplish. A very good book on this, for example, is The 10x Rule. Whenever you think something, just 10x it. And yeah, make sure to, to go all in. Highly recommend. So define for yourself where you want to be on this ladder within the next few years. And I recommend with vision work to always have a vision for the next 5 years. Longer than that I think is useless because the world rapidly changes, you change, and thinking about 10 years from now it's just almost impossible to think about where you want to be. And yeah, so 5 years is a recommendation. Where do you want to be? And then start with purpose and meaning. Because based on the combination of this and this, we can define the, uh, wellbeing dimensions. And you can start this by defining your pillars. Because I find it really challenging to limit myself to one niche or one product or one thing, even though I know that by creating focus you can create momentum and you can get the best business results. I just don't like to be limited by the idea of having one pillar or one thing to work on. So what works very well for me is setting up the pillars from which I operate. And for me, the pillars are technology, uh, and that is web plus AI. It is well-being, and I'm mainly focused on fitness, health, nutrition, and sleep, etc. And since ADHD also is such a big part of my life and also what I will be making content about, this is also a pillar. So those are the 3 pillars that I operate from. And what this helps with is really helping you with your direction. So whenever I, for example, make a video about ADHD, I try to include well-being aspects. Or whenever I'm building a specific technology, I'm also trying to make it ADHD-friendly or focus on how it can impact well-being. And having this listed out, so what are your main pillars, will help you to basically get direction in life. Because otherwise you just keep going this direction and this direction and you get that new opportunity, but you just never know what to actually choose. So those pillars will help you to gain focus, gain momentum, and not be limited to just one thing. But yeah, build a connection between those pillars and have direction to where to go to. Um, okay, that were the pillars. And then it's also nice to define a mission statement. So for me personally, um, last year when I really dove deep in after the burnout in where I want to go and who I want to become and who I want to help I really did found out that I've really lost the touch with the human connection because I was doing so much technical work to just scale businesses and building technology to help other businesses. I learned that I really want to help more people instead of just business results. So the goal for me, the mission statement for me now includes building technology with my agency called Seamless Agency. That also transforms the lives of people. And then probably also including that well-being aspect, because then all the pillars are basically combined into everything that I think I'm— I can serve people in and that I'm unique in. I can basically, yeah, define that into that one mission statement, and that gives me direction. And I recommend you to do this as well. Then there's vision board creation. So for your vision, I recommend to basically create a vision board. And to explain what a vision board is, I will just give a random example. So if we Google vision board, we can find vision boards. And this can be a vision board to remind you where you're going and who you are becoming. So what you can list down here is all the things that relate to your pillar, to your mission statement, and just the things that will make you happy. So for example, if you're a cars fan and you want, you have a dream car idea, just drop in the dream car here. It can be anything that motivates you to keep on grinding and keep on working and remember you why you started this. So that's a vision board, lovely to make one, and I recommend you to look at it a lot in the beginning, maybe even 2 times a day when you wake up and go to bed. Keep on reminding why you're here and what you're doing here. Then there's goals, and for goal setting, I recommend you to do one big goal setting session every year, just the start of the year. Define your goals for the year based on the pillars and the mission statement. Reverse engineer that into your yearly goals, and then every quarter, so quarterly, reflect on those goals and check how everything is going, if you need to align things or make new goals or adjustments and stuff like that. So just to make sure you keep on track. So quarterly, split up those goals into smaller tasks. But overall, I recommend to not have so much goals, maybe 5 to 10 goals per year is enough. Because if you have too many, it just gets cluttered and you basically will forget about things. And having just larger goals in general, and looking at them on a daily level and adjusting just quarterly. Yeah, I think that's a nice system to be high, be making high impact. Then there's lifestyle design, and for this one I have two nice exercises. One is the perfect day exercise, and what you do for that is you— this is more like a meditation kind of exercise where you close your eyes and you start visualizing yourself from the moment you wake up until you go to bed. And what you do is you define your perfect day so you feel okay. Where do I wake up? Which city do I live in? What bed do I sleep in? What desk am I working in? What work am I doing? With who am I? So you basically start visualizing all this and you imagine how your perfect day will look like because this is basically giving you inspiration and input on how to design your life. And then there's the week exercise. And this one is basically planning your perfect week and also scheduling this in your calendar. And I will show my agenda for this one as example. And what you can see is that I basically have blocked a lot of time in my calendar and not everything is like a hard deadline or a hard set. It's more to give, uh, um, yeah, give some structure in how I would like my day to be. So for example, every day I have my morning routine. And as I already mentioned, there are days where I completely skip it and I just instantly go to work because I don't feel it. And this is completely fine. Those are just guiding principles that will help you and give direction. For me, in the morning routine, I mostly try to do at least like 1 hour without caffeine, without screens, and just slowly waking up. And then basically doing a workout afterwards. I try to meditate, journal, and Yeah, do everything that works for me. And as mentioned already, sometimes I do nothing, but there probably will be another video about routine and all the things that I do for it. So won't be going too deep onto that now. If you have any questions about it, just ask me. For the rest, I plan focus work in the morning because I'm most fresh, uh, in the morning to do the deeper work. And then I have a lunch break for 1 hour, try to do some walks sometimes and just really take some time off. And then later in the day it's time for creative and strategy work. Yeah, because that best aligns with how I naturally work. Then there's time for some reflection and then closing off with— if I didn't do the workout in the morning, then I do it in the afternoon, or I consume some media, watch some YouTube videos and stuff like that. So I have this pre-planned in my calendar every day, and people can still book meetings with me in some specific moments, or I book it for myself. So this is not 100% how I follow, but I always try to be in line with this setup. That is basically how it works. So that was the week exercise. Then now, after defining where we want to be with the business and our purpose, vision, goals, and lifestyle design, we can also set targets for the well-being dimension. So now that we want to go know where we want to go, we can define which dimensions are mostly needed to get to where we want to go. And then we can set KPIs, targets of how we want to become. So for example, if I noticed that I'm losing touch with my friends, I'm not socializing anymore, I could define a goal and start journaling on the social dimension and see if it will improve. This is just a random example, but you can fill this in however you would like. So what we did, we did the current self and all the examples that I listed here. Then we defined the future self with the targets for the wellbeing dimensions, for business, and the life vision and goals. And now it's actually time for the hard work, really making this reality, because it's all fine and all great to think a lot about this, and it's necessary to think about this. But of course, we also need to make sure that we adjust our lifestyle and behavior to transform into that future self. And I mentioned the hard part, but to be honest, I don't think it's really hard. And that is just my idea on improving your life. In the beginning, it's quite challenging to make good habits, yeah, feel naturally. But if you just commit for like a month, it will be feeling natural to you and you find it harder to not do it. So for me, for example, meditating. If I go a week without meditation, I go crazy. Because it helps me so much with feeling peace, feeling more calm. That in the beginning I really had to struggle with 3 minutes of meditation. But after doing it for now almost 3 years, I really can't live without. And that is for most of the things. So Those examples might sound a bit extreme that I'm going to mention about how I live, but trust me, a lot of them are so nice to implement into your life. And when they, when you commit to it for a specific period, you can see what works for you and then it will start to feel natural. So to start off, I want to dive into this one: you do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. And I love systems, that's also why This is a system, this video. So try to build systems because systems are going to help you with actually achieving your goals. A goal is nothing without a system. If you don't have a plan on how to reach a goal, you are not going to make it. So how do we set up a system that helps for you? I'm going to show some examples, um, in this one on lifestyle and behavior, starting off with your daily habits because I believe that is where everything starts. And to start off, I want to dive in this thing called a Whoop. And maybe you know what a Whoop is. It's a band that I've been wearing for 3 years now. And man, oh man, oh man, this thing has completely changed my life, to be honest. And I will show you how it works in just a sec. This is my monthly report from this month, and it's completely filled with data about me, about how well I sleep, how well I exercise, if I had too much stress, how much strain I had, my heart rate zones, how well I recover throughout the month, my sleep performance, how well my HRV— and everything is going green, so we— you can see I'm doing, doing well recently. And this is all data that I collect by wearing this band and tracking specific behaviors. And that is so helping me so much to get clear direction on things that are yeah, helping me in life. And how it actually works is— whoop daily journal— you get a daily journal where you basically fill in the app, in, uh, you track specific behaviors. So here are some examples: did you take any caffeine, or how much? Did you hydrate enough? Did you drink any alcohol, for example? And then you basically get insights on how those specific behaviors are impacting your sleep and your recovery And of course also it tracks your exercise, so it also warns you when you train too much or when you can do a little more. And this is really, really helpful. So highly recommend you checking out Whoop. I will put the link in the description so you can see if you— if this is something for you. A really nice book is Atomic Habits. It's by the same writer as the personal value list I shared in the beginning, James Clear. And one of the tactics that I use is habit stacking. It's basically stepping, stacking specific habits together to build systems, yeah, to basically implement this into your life. Then there's energy levels. Tracking your energy also is very important. And besides that, you can use Whoop if you don't like these wearable devices and stuff like that. There's also the option to do this with manual journaling. And I already mentioned that I highly recommend you to do journaling. And journaling You can go as far as you want, but what is really nice to do for a specific period is tracking some things within your journal. And you can also use Excel or Notion or whatever structured table you want for this. But what to track is, for example, uh, how was my focus score today, or more important, how happy was I today. And then you can write down the journal of the day, which is some text about the day and what you did, etc. And if you do that for like 1 month, then you get, get really good insights in how specific things that you do and the feelings that you have are impacting those scores. And if you track those scores for just like a month and you share this information maybe with AI, if you're okay with that, or, or you just do the analysis yourself, then you can get very nice insights on how things are impacting. So that's what I recommend to do for, yeah, at least 30 days. Track some things like focus, happy, or whatever is important to you. Maybe other things from the dimensions. So did I see my friends this week? Did I save money this week or month? Or did I work out? You can track it all and just do it for a short time will give many insights. You don't have to be as extreme as me and wearing a Whoop every day. You can just do it in small steps and see if this is something for you. Then there's productivity and Routine, very important. I already mentioned I have quite an extreme morning routine, but there definitely are a lot of days where I don't do anything at all. But one thing I do highly recommend everyone, and especially if you're someone with ADHD, cold showers are amazing because they don't take any extra time. You can shower less, but they raise your dopamine levels by up to 400% for 4 hours without a drop. So it's literally literally feels like a cheat code. And I do cold showers every day for like 3 years now, and it completely changed because after a cold shower my focus just spikes and I feel just way, way better. Also something that I really can't live without now. I also really recommend to meditate sometimes, especially when you're stressed. I do a lot of breathwork. That's something that you can check if that's something for you. But again, I won't be going really deep onto routines. If you really want to find nice things for your routine, you— I recommend you to check check another video or maybe my future video that I will be making on it. Dopamine. Dopamine is an interesting thing. I listed here specifically because I think it is so important related to productivity. Actually, I think it is the most important thing related to output. When I optimize my dopamine levels, I mean, sometimes I even forget I have ADHD. Because there are so many things you can work on to fix your dopamine levels. And there are some extreme things like dopamine detoxing, where you basically go, for example, a week without high dopamine activities like social media, gaming, eating junk food, and all that shit. This will help you reset your baseline. And then because you don't get dopamine from those bad habits and bad things, then you will find the pleasure from work and work starts to get exciting, or other things that are normally draining you are starting to get interesting because you are missing the dopamine from the high dopamine things. And you can basically, yeah, find happiness in the things that you normally hate to do. So it's a crazy thing, but you can also do it just in a more less extreme method. And this is what I really recommend to do because I think it's quite easy. Is basically waiting with your high-activity dopamine habits till later in the day. So for example, if you wake up, don't check social media. If you like to game or something like that, it's completely fine, but do it at the end of the day. Because if you start your day with high dopamine activities, high dopamine behavior, then it's really, really hard to afterwards dive into a boring writing task or reading something because your dopamine baselines are already messed up. By that high dopamine activities. Then there's health routines and diet, sleep, workout. Also can't tell how important it is, and I think the order should be sleep, workout, diet. Sleep most important. I always try to sleep 8 hours. Whoop also advises me on this. I also have an 8 sleep, um, very expensive product, so this is definitely not for everyone, but it keeps my bed cool at night. It basically, yeah, is a mattress that is cooling and heating to keep your body in a perfect temperature to have as much deep sleep as possible. Improved me like 1 hour of sleep every night. So can be really nice, but basics, go to bed early. Because you can set an alarm, but that is not going to help you because you will get tired. Going to bed early and sleeping without an alarm Man, oh man, this is impacting my energy level so much. I just used to sleep like 6, maybe 7 hours and always wake up with an alarm. And then you wake up foggy head and just not motivated to start. If you go to bed early, man, this helps so much with waking up better and starting the day with excitement. Working out, also second after diet, I think this is the most important because working out especially if you have ADHD. It does a lot. Having to— having to be— ability to, yeah, be physically active will boost everything. Dopamine levels, but also motivation. And check what works for you. Find something that is fun to you, that feels fun to you. And with a lot of physical activity in the beginning, it's just not fun. But when you find something that works and you stick to it for a specific period, as with the other things it will become fun and then it's good. I sometimes switch it up, so sometimes I go biking with friends, or sometimes I find a new challenge like the HIROX that I just mentioned, where I have to do a lot of running and a lot of cardio. And specific periods I focus on fitness, achieving for example a new bench press record. Just switching it up to keep you fit and to experiment with things and find something that you like. Because I highly recommend working out, to be honest, almost every day. And if you can't work out, which also is completely fine, just go for a quick walk or do something. And again, go for that 80/20. If you skip some days, nothing to panic about, but try to at least be physically active. Diet. Since around 1 year, I try to almost skip all processed foods. And also here again, 80/20, because yesterday evening I went out for dinner I had some nice sugary snacks afterwards. Yeah, I just took a dessert. So I'm not extreme with these things, but overall day to day I try to skip as much processed foods as possible. And I also noticed that this really impacts my energy levels and my mental clarity as well. Then there's time management. And for this I recommend the book Buy Back Your Time. And why I included time management in this one, is because you might be wondering, okay, all those things that you're mentioning will be taking a lot of time. So how am I going to do this? Well, the goal should be to basically start buying back your time, because if you start implementing those habits, I highly, highly, highly, highly believe— I surely believe that you will optimize your business in some way. And if you become the version that has more energy, more mental clarity, you can do more work in less time. And then you can start using the systems that buy back your time by Dan Martell, very nice person, very nice writer. The system that he uses, explains in his book, will be able to basically let you buy back your time. So outsource the things that doesn't align with your natural strengths. So you know who you are because of your current self, you also know where you're good in, you also know where you're good at, and you also know where you want to be heading to, towards your future self, make sure that the things you are still doing are in line with that. And for the rest, if it doesn't align with your future self, try to outsource it. Buy back your time and spend that own time into your well-being. And this is basically creating a flywheel effect. And then for here, so this is the image of the journal. You can do it physically, digitally, if you track specific behaviors with the scores like I explained. I recommend to do it digitally so you easily have the data and can also use it with AI and stuff like that. This is the Whoop band we discussed. And then finally, to basically summarize this, I want to explain you have current self, future self, and like the most important thing is building that feedback loop. So by basically growing into that, from that current self to your future self, you will start seeing yourself in a different way. It's basically that scale that will basically have the ideas of what I explained where I was lazy. When I started myself accomplishing things and doing things, and also now with this YouTube video, I know after this video I'm going to be proud of myself that I did another video. And that builds on my self-image. And that is what this feedback loop will basically allow you to do. You set goals, And even the micro things, the micro wins, celebrate them. And then you can look in the mirror and be proud of yourself. Work on yourself, you will gain confidence, you will gain momentum, and you will continuously evolve from that current self into that future self, adjusting, building new goals, writing out that new vision. And the more you accomplish, celebrate it, micro win it, and then you build on that scale of confidence and you start transforming all those limiting beliefs in actually empowering beliefs and building the life that you actually want. So yeah, that was actually it for the video. Thank you so much for staying till the end of this video. I've shared a lot and it was pretty high level. If you want to zoom in deeper on this, I can help you with that. Um, yeah, there's a link in the description where you can book a coaching call with me. This will be a paid session, uh, to be honest. I will— I just want to be fully transparent. The discovery call is free so we can get to know each other, and if there's a match, I can help you with this system. I have a lot of templates, systems, and we can check together. So I can help you with defining your current self, looking where you want to go, and also be your accountability partner to basically work on that gap and start implementing the habits and stuff like that. So if this is something for you, check out the link in the description to the coaching funnel, and then I hope to see you there. If that is not the case, then no worries at all. I will keep posting YouTube videos just like this, and I hope to see you in the next one. Thank you so much and have a wonderful day. Bye-bye.